


Myth of the Eternal Return

by SailorSol



Category: Ancient Egyptian Religion, His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Backstory, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Daemons, Gen, Mentions of canon characters - Freeform, Mythology References, Origins of Dust, Pre-Canon, Worldbuilding, dust - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 19:42:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2241084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SailorSol/pseuds/SailorSol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Church would have it known that Dust was a result of the Fall.</p>
<p>The Church would have it known that many things were a result of the Fall, that the wickedness of Eve and all her daughters would cripple Man until the End of Days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Myth of the Eternal Return

**Author's Note:**

  * For [redsnake05](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redsnake05/gifts).



> I do hope you like this. I poked through your journal until I stumbled across the fact that you liked Egyptian mythology, and this idea popped out at me and wouldn't leave me alone. I'm not sure I did either world any justice (it was difficult to find good information on Ma'at and Sekhmet), but I hope you don't mind the creative liberties I took.
> 
> Title from the work of the same name, by Mircea Eliade. A rather interesting bit of philosophical reading about myth cycles and repetition.

The Church would have it known that Dust was a result of the Fall.

The Church would have it known that many things were a result of the Fall, that the wickedness of Eve and all her daughters would cripple Man until the End of Days.

But those who live outside the reaches of the Church, those who have found ways to defy the edicts meant to keep people in ignorance the way Adam and Eve were kept in the Garden, the seekers of knowledge who embrace the Fall—they are the ones who know the truth.

For you see, daemons are not limited to those people who live by the rules of the Church, and yet Dust still clings to them, their daemons still settle, and the Paradise of childhood and ignorance is left behind.

Proof, you say? Yes, I can give you proof, knowledge gleaned in forgotten temples and crumbling libraries, where language is not as we know it today but the stories are still there for the telling.

Imagine yourself, for just a moment, looking out across endless sand. Heat shimmers, twisting into shapes that trick the eye and the mind. Closer is the lush green ribbon of life, wellspring, greatest of great rivers. And you, standing in shadow cast by cool alabaster stone, surveying all of this through dark eyes.

Egypt.

A land that features heavily in the stories of the Church, but this story is older than that of the slave boy raised as a prince, and older yet than the boy sold by brothers into slavery. This is a story the Church would not have told, for here the lies of the Church are so easily seen as nothing more than the other mirages across the desert.

This story, like all others, has become twisted in the telling and the passage of time. So it was with the story of Eve, so it will be with the story of Lyra of the Silver Tongue, and of those who came before and who will come after, as the cycle continues.

Goddess, she became known as in later years, but at the beginning she was simply Ma’at.

There are many versions of the story of what happened next. Some say that Sekhmet was sent by Ra himself, to punish those of the land who failed to uphold the concepts of justice and balance. In other versions, the humans have plotted against Ra and Sekhmet was sent to slaughter only those before raging out of control.

The truth, of course, can be found somewhere in between the stories.

It is true that there were those in Egypt who fought against the reign of Ra, and it is true that justice could sometimes be lost as easily as landmarks in a sandstorm. The source of contention between the Egyptians and their sun god focused mainly around a single topic: what happens after death.

Sound familiar yet?

Ma’at was not one of these rebels; at the time, she was not much more than a child, though soon to be a woman in the customs of her time. But just as Eve and Lyra found themselves unwittingly in the midst of a battle far greater than themselves, Ma’at was seen to be the key.

So based upon a prophecy, the rebels took her to a place where even the gods could not tread; a dead place, much like the places that the witches of Lyra’s world found. They didn’t know what they were doing when they crossed into that stretch of desert, didn’t know that they were both saving themselves and damning themselves. For at the time, humans and daemons were not yet separate, like in the world of Will and Mary Malone.

But as Will would learn while crossing into the land of the dead, so Ma’at also learned the pain of being separated from her daemon. A fierce lioness, Sekhmet was borne forth from that agony, and unlike Kirjava who had Pantalaimon to explain things to her, Sekhmet had no one.

And so, the first of the daemons raged for the loss of her human. She sought out those who would do Ma’at harm. Ra watched as Sekhmet ravaged the lands. It was only when Ma’at herself came face to face with the great god that he finally brought an end to the massacre.

You see, just as Lyra would come to be sympathetic to the side of Lord Asriel--that is, those who opposed the reign of the Almighty--Ma’at had spent enough time with the rebels to come to sympathize with them. And being faced now with such proof of her soul, in the form of the slumbering Sekhmet, it was most difficult for her not to question what happened to them after death.

So the child, who was now more woman than not, faced down a god and demanded that--in the name of balance and justice, as she would later become renowned for--Ra would offer an existence for both humans and daemons after death.

I wish I could tell you this story has a happy ending, but when one trifles with gods, the results are rarely in the humans’ favor. For while Ra did create a place for humans to go after death, it was a dark place, devoid of hope and happiness, where people were doomed to linger for ages upon ages until Lyra of the Silver Tongue set them free.

But so impressed by the woman-child’s tenacity was Ra that he granted humans another kind of gift; the gift of their daemons. So while there would be no life everlasting for humans and daemons, they would at least have this single lifetime to live together knowingly. The Dust, which had once been inside people, now existed in the form that Mary Malone would later learn to interpret. And when a child learns to accept and embrace their daemon, that is when a daemon settles and the Dust clings to both of them.

But the Church would have you think that Dust was temptation, because they longed for the innocence of childhood and all of the possibilities of life laid out before them. Eve ate the forbidden fruit and the Dust clung to her and made her glow. And Lyra too would follow in the footsteps of the women before her, to claim the right of all creatures with souls.

Dust comes from daemons, and daemons come from us.

 

 


End file.
